The Banjo

The banjo is a string instrument built with a thin, stretched membrane—today usually a plastic called BOPET, but historically goat skin—over a frame that acts as a resonator. Its earliest versions were made by African Americans and trace back to African instruments, and for a long time it was closely tied to Black culture. In the 1800s, traveling blackface minstrel shows spread interest in the banjo across the United States and the United Kingdom, leading to mass production, mail-order sales, and instructional books. While cheap or homemade banjos stayed part of rural folk traditions, five-string and four-string models became popular for home parlor music, college music clubs, and early jazz bands. By the early 1900s, the banjo was most often linked to folk, cowboy, and country music. By mid-century, it became strongly associated with bluegrass, and later it appeared occasionally in various other popular music styles. Famous American bluegrass banjo players include Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs. Alongside the fiddle, the banjo is a key instrument in American genres like bluegrass and old-time music, and it is also common in Dixieland jazz and Caribbean styles such as biguine, calypso, mento, and twoubadou.

The word "banjo" may come from several sources. One idea ties it to the Mandinka language, which gives the name Banjul, capital of The Gambia. Another connects it to the West African akonting, which has a long bamboo neck called a bangoe; the neck material, called ban julo in Mandinka, again suggests banjul, so the instrument’s name may have traveled across the Atlantic. It might also come from the Kimbundu word mbanza, which became the Portuguese term banza, used by early French travelers in the Americas. The earliest recorded use was in 1678, when the Sovereign Council of Martinique reinstated a 1654 decree restricting dances and gatherings of enslaved Africans called kalenda, which involved dancing to a drum and an instrument called the banza. The Oxford English Dictionary claims the term comes from a dialectal pronunciation of Portuguese bandore or an early anglicisation of Spanish bandurria. However, evidence shows that bandore and bandurria were used when Europeans encountered instruments played by people of African descent, who called them names like banza (as in Haiti). These instruments were built around a gourd body with a wooden plank for a neck. In 1810, François Richard de Tussac, a former planter from Saint-Domingue, described their construction: a fresh calabash (the fruit of a callebassier tree) was cut lengthwise, sometimes over eight inches wide; goat skin was stretched across it and fastened with small nails; two or three small holes were made in the skin; a rough plank or piece of wood formed the neck; and three strings made from pitre (a fiber from the agave plant) were stretched across it. On this instrument, players performed tunes of three or four notes, repeated constantly.

The modern banjo comes from instruments used in North America and the Caribbean since the 1600s by enslaved people from West and Central Africa, such as the kora. These African-style instruments were made from split gourds with animal skin stretched over them, and strings from gut or plant fibers attached to a wooden neck. Written references to the banjo in North America and the Caribbean appear in the 1600s and 1700s. The earliest written mention of a similar instrument is from 1621, when Richard Jobson described The Gambia: he wrote of an instrument made from a large gourd with a neck attached, resembling a bandora but without frets, having up to six strings that were tuned with pegs. In the early 1800s, naturalist Michel Étienne Descourtilz visited Haiti and described banzas as a Negro instrument made by sawing a calabash or large gourd lengthwise, attaching a neck, and using strings from aloe plant fibers. It was played at any time—out of boredom, at joyful parties, at calendas, or at funeral ceremonies—and was often combined with the bamboula, a drum made from a bamboo stick covered on both sides with skin, played with fingers and knuckles while sitting astride. Various African instruments, especially the kora, feature a similar design.